The main way of starting node chains is with
launch.
This is done by the
NodeChainOperation.
As a starting point you should
have a look at the node chain tutorial,
which tells you what you need at least to process some data.
To get a good understanding of the structure of the configuration files in the software,
have a look at the
YAML description.

The usual way to run the node chains is to use it via pySPACE. To get
an idea how this works, you should take a look
at the NodeChainOperation tutorial.
The configuration in either case is based on a configuration file (in the
YAML format) specifying which nodes shall be processed in which order and
with which parameters. For starting the software with pySPACE
you will also need a specification file
for the corresponding NodeChainOperation.

After going through the aforementioned tutorials, you roughly know how to deal with data
that has already been recorded, the so called offline data processing.
Nevertheless, there is the live part,
that was specifically developed for online data processing,
which is done using the corresponding
scripts
or launch_live.